Features

After several delays, the PC release of Fable 3 slipped into the unknown and we were left with only an undelivered promise and some teasing gameplay at this year’s CES. Well, it seems publisher Microsoft has once again returned to the project, and we’ve been given a new date for release: May 17th, 2011. The PC release will bring Nvidia’s 3D Vision technology as well as a hardcore difficulty that isn’t available on console versions.

After months of rumors and a ton of community hacks, Microsoft has officially announced that Kinect will receive PC support for Windows 7 users. The free Windows driver pack will come with an SDK (Software Development Kit) that will allow gamers to code Kinect support into their own games and applications.

The driver kit and SDK are scheduled to release this Spring. Of course, the hardware itself is already widely available in the Xbox 360 section of your local electronics store.

For those still using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser (or for those that are giving it a second chance), you’ll be happy to know that the release candidate for IE9 is now available for download on both x86 and x64 system running either Windows 7 or Vista. Download it here and let us know your thoughts!

Microsoft has announced today that Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 will be available via Microsoft Download Center and Windows Update. For those of you who are TechNet and MSDN Subscribers, you’ll be able to snatch it on February 16th.

Own a Mac and want to hop on the Office 2011 wagon but not sure if it’ll be worth it? Not a problem. You can now try it free for 30 days before you lay down that $150 (at least). Of course, there are other ways to try it out for free, but that’s certainly at your own disposal.

I suppose we could have saw this coming back in November and Microsoft’s head hancho Steve Ballmer even said it himself that Kinect would be arriving on Windows at some point, but we had no idea when. According to WinRumors, Microsoft is currently working on an SDK and official drivers of Kinect for Windows and will both be released in the next few months in beta form. It’s also said that the next version of Windows (i.e. Windows 8) will include full Kinect support out of the box, which will focus on gesture-based controls.

CES 2011 has now come and gone and what a week it was! While the show officially started on Thursday, companies were already announcing and unveiling new products as early as Monday, and since I didn’t cover everything that happened under the Las Vegas Convention Center roof, I decided to sit down and reflect back on the week, as well as catch up on stuff that I missed.

After the break, I’ll be recapping some of the best in PC products that were shown at CES and give you my prediction on what this year will have in store for us based on what we saw at CES 2011.

Well, well, well. We already know that Kinect can work on a PC with a little hackage, but Microsoft wasn’t going in on that just yet. However, in an interview with BBC, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that the company will support Kinect for PC “in a formal way in the right time.” He went on saying that when they “have an announcement to make, we’ll make that announcement.”

So it seems like Kinect for PC will definitely be coming officially at some point, and it’ll be interesting to see how they will implement the device within the PC platform.

Though the game’s release date is still lost deep in the corners of time, it seems Microsoft is holding out on us as evidenced by their display of a playable PC demo of Fable 3 at their CES booth this year. No further information has been given regarding the game’s development or release status, but things are looking good for a Fable 3 2011 PC release.

Microsoft has unveiled their next generation Microsoft Surface and guess what? It still won’t be available to consumers. Nonetheless, the company demoed a few features of the new tabletop slab, which is being manufactured by Samsung and will actually be called the Samsung SUR40, not the Microsoft Surface. One interesting factoid is that it includes Microsoft’s own PixelSense technology, which gives an LCD display the power to recognize fingers, hands and objects that are placed on the screen. Individual pixels in the display can see what’s touching the screen and that information is immediately processed and interpreted.

The Surface 2.0 (as it’s called on Microsoft’s website) is only 4-inches thick and uses Gorilla glass (a very strong, durable type of glass) for the surface. It’ll also cost a whopping $7,600, which is actually less than what the 1st gen Surface costs ($12,000).